all whirlwind, heat & flash
by Ivory Muse
Summary: Tim Shepard learns to put on a tie. Also, his maybe-not-quite-friend is dead.


Your father has his own room. It's not much of a room, more of an overgrown storage closet— Ma, bless her fucking heart, bitches about how she needs to get around to throwing out your drunken thug daddy's things every other weekend— but it's untouched, in permanent stasis. A lost decade.

But now you need a tie, because Dallas Winston is dead and how he goes down in history is not your choice. Ma's shrieking again from the kitchen, you think, something 'bout how she always knew the Winston boy was trouble and how she don't want her son associating with trash like that (about five years and a lifetime too late), while she picks out the best rosary in the house to send to Curly.

"When someone from the Shepard gang kicks the bucket," you say under your breath (when, not if), rifling through dusty drawers, "we ain't havin' none of this bullshit. The fuzz can do whatever the hell they want with the body, and we'll have a goddamn bonfire in the vacant lot and get blitzed. Better fucking way to 'honor his memory', that's for sure."

You keep Dally's shit in here. Buck Merrill was ready to just throw it out of the spare room he was squatting in, but like your mother, you are much too sentimental for your own good. You tell yourself you're saving the clothes and cigs for when Curly gets out of the slammer, and you tell yourself this often. Dally doesn't have a tie— it'd be pretty damn funny if you showed up to the guy's own funeral wearing his, but Dad does have one after all, buried under smokescented sweaters and a bag of suspicious-looking white powder. You loop it around your neck, hesitantly. Okay. The hard part's finished.

Ma at least taught you how to shave. Tying a tie? You've got no daddy— it's useless in this neighborhood, besides. You haven't stopped wondering how many dicks Ponyboy sucked to raise enough money for a memorial service since you first got the invitation, and you had to spend half of Winston's money (you have no idea how a jockey had so much stashed under his mattress in the first place) on a suit. Putting the large end over the small end, you proceed to make what can only be described as a hopelessly tangled noose. Fuck.

The door creaks open. "Tim?"

You see her in the mirror, the reflection green and blurry, playing with a stray thread at the bottom of her too-short skirt. "Angel," you reply. Don't turn around to face her.

"Is that Dad's?" she says without further introduction, and points at your neck. The word is a foreign country on her tongue— yours was dead before she was six. You don't know if she can contemplate a father she isn't screwing.

"No shit," you snap. Damn. It's crooked, and you tug at the longer end again.

"So... you're goin' to the service, then?" she asks, hands on her hips. You swear she acts more like your mother every year, and she's just fourteen. "Ma's pissed 'cause you didn't tell her nothin' about -"

"The hell is this, twenty questions?" you shout. None of this is her goddamn fault, but the words come out anyway. "I'm goin', and you can tell Ma to shove it up her ass. I ain't interested."

She actually flinches, which, from Angela, is about the same as bursting into tears. For the first time since she walked in, you get a good look at her— tangled hair, shadows under her eyes— and immediately regret opening your big mouth. "Sorry," you mutter. "It's just—"

"Why the fuck," she demands, "did you 'n Sylvia deal with him? I always knew this'd happen. He'd die like an idiot, and now I have to clean up the mess."

You can't argue the point. Badass, nothing-ever-fucking-touches-me Dallas died with an empty gun, because the good die young and the bad make sure they die even younger. Johnny Cade oughta count himself lucky that he's in a better place now, or you swear you'd kill the little shit bare-handed.

"He was a real man," you hear yourself say, as if from a great distance. "You don't understand— you don't remember him none."

Angela is tough— tougher and smarter than Curly, maybe even tougher and smarter than you. You taught her how to fight and steal and smoke weeds good as any boy, no matter if snot-nosed Soc girls called her a dyke. 'Cause maybe you wouldn't be around forever, and counting on your mother or your brother or God forbid one of your stepfathers is impossible. But she can't deal with this any more than you can. "A real man," she mocks, only half-heartedly. "Thought you might want to see the paper."

She leaves, probably to go console Sylvia Connor, who's been bawling on your couch for the past week. You pick the paper she dropped at her feet up and regret it— it's a tiny segment of a police report. At 1:42 A.M., an adolescent male (name redacted, even though it's no secret) was shot dead in a confrontation with police after an armed robbery of a convenience store, to the tune of three hundred dollars. Crime with all the glitz and none of the glamor, just his style.

("Never thought I'd see your ugly mug in the paper without 'wanted dead or alive' written on top.")

(A real man. Don't think about how he was barely seventeen. Don't think about how Johnny was the one thing he came close to loving. Don't ever, ever think about how the twisted smirks, the flashes of sunlight on a switchblade, hid the loneliest person you knew.)

You fling it down, harder than you should, and look yourself over, trying to find purchase in the contours of your face. In your trussed-up, gentleman form. You have your father's features, same messy hair sharp cheekbones wide dark eyes, except for your scar. Temple to chin; I have conquered. Dallas was a real fucking prizefighter, always swinging his fists and huge proud dick all over the goddamn place, but his skin stayed as smooth as a baby's ass. Like he was some kind of Greek hero you learned about in high school— Achilles, that was his name. A perfect machine, just one hamartia—

It's a dirty, smeared shard of a mirror, and suddenly you're seized by the urge to pull your arm back and break. Break and destroy and let yourself bleed, like you always do.

But he's still going to be dead. You could burn down the entire world and he'd still be dead.

You drop the fist, real slow, and finally close your eyes— you are not crying, you are not crying, you are not crying.


End file.
